It's been a long time since we looked at the object database in Frontier, so today Brent wrote a little app that checks out how the hash function distributes objects across the buckets for each table in the database.

Here's how the function works. It takes the first and last characters of the name of the object, adds them together and mods the result by the number of buckets, which is 11.

As the OPML Editor started up it made 125,091 calls to the hash function, and the results were distributed among the buckets as follows.

0: 14,792

1: 3,840

2: 9,629

3: 8,440

4: 15,368

5: 11,306

6: 7,561

7: 17,605

8: 13,074

9: 13,651

10: 9,815

This looks pretty random to us.

If anyone reading this is an expert in hash function trivia, if you have an opinion, please chime in.